To this his officer answered: "If you don"t get up behind me I"ll get off and I"ll give you such a licking as you"ve never had in your life."The man was more afraid of fists than assagais2, andthe good horse pulled them both out of the scrape. Now, by the regulations, an officer who threatens with violence a subordinate of his service is liable to lose his commission, and to be declared "incapable of serving the queen in any capacity": but the trooper never reported his superior.
I have never yet come across a V. C. who had not the strictest notions about washing and shaving and keeping himself quiet and decent on his way through the civilized world. Indeed, it is very curious, after one has known hundreds of young men and officers, to sit still at a distance and watch them come forward to success in their profession. The clean and considerate man always seems to take hold of circumstances at the right end.
1Claymore: a large, two-handed sword.
2Assagais: spears used by native tribes in South Africa.
One of the latest and youngest of the V. C"s, I used to know distantly as a beautiful being whom they called aid-de-camp1 to some big official in India. So far as an outsider could judge, his duties consisted in wearing a uniform faced with blue satin and in seeing that every one enjoyed himself at the dances and dinners.
A few years later his chance came and he made the most of it. We were then smoking out a nest of caravan-raiders, slave- dealers, and general thieves, who lived somewhere under the Karakoram Mountains, among glaciers about sixteen thousand feet above the sea level. The mere road to the place was too much for many mules, for it ran by precipices and around rock curves and over roaring, snow-fed rivers.
The enemy-they were called Kanjuts2 this time-hadfortified themselves in a place as nearly impregnable3 as nature and man could make it. One position was on the top of a cliff about twelve hundred feet high, whence they could roll stones directly on the head of any attacking force. Our men objected to the stones much more than to the rifle fire. They were down in a river bed at the bottom of an icy pass with some three tiers of cliff-like defenses above them, and the Kanjuts were very well armed. To make all pleasant, it was December.
The ex-aid-de -camp was a good mountaine, and1Aid-de-camp: an officer chosen by a general to carry orders and to assist and represent him in other ways.
2kanjuts: a tribe in India.
3Impregnable: unconquerable; that cannot be taken.
he was told off with a hundred natives, Goorkhas and Dogra Sikhs1, to get into the top tier of fortifications, and the only way of arriving was to follow a sort of shoot in the cliff face, which the enemy had worn out by throwing rocks down. By daylight, in peace, and with guides, it would have been good mountaineering.
He went in the dark, by eye, and with some two thousand Kanjuts very much at war with him. When he had climbed eight hundred feet, almost perpendicular, he found he must come back, because even he and his cragsmen could find no way.
He returned to the river and began again in a new place, working his men up between avalanches that slid along and knocked people over. When he got to the top he had to take his men into the forts with the bayonets and the kukri, the little Goorkha knife. The thing was so bold that it broke the hearts of the enemy and practically ended the campaign; and if you could see the place you would understand why.
It was hard toe-nail and finger-nail mountaineering under fire, and the men behind him were not regulars, but men raised by the semi-independent kings and used to defend the frontier. The little aid-de-camp got a deserved Victoria Cross. The courage of Ulysses2 again; for he had to think as he climbed, and until he was directly under the fortifications one chance- hopping bowlder might just have planed his men off all along1Goorkhas, DograSikhs: Indian tribes, loyal to the English.
2Ulysses or Odysseus: the wisest of the Greek heroes who fought against Troy.
the line.
And when all is said and done, courage of mind is the finest thing any one can hope to attain to. A weak or undisciplined soul is apt to become reckless under strain - and this is being afraid the wrong way about-or to act for its own immediate advantage. For this reason the Victoria Cross is jealously guarded. Men are taught to volunteer for anything and everything; going out quietly after, not before, the authorities have filled their place. They are also instructed that it is cowardly, it is childish, and it is cheating to neglect the plain work immediately in front of them, the duties they are trusted and paid to do for the sake of stepping aside to snatch at what to an outsider may resemble fame or distinction.
The order itself is a personal decoration, and the honor and glory of it belong to the wearer; but he can only win it by forgetting himself, his own honor and glory, and by working for something beyond and outside and apart. And that is the only way you ever get anything in this world worth the keeping.